Drive (2011)
I'm
going to nail my flag to the mast straight from the off on this one. I love
Drive
. No, I don't love it, I've become obsessed by it. When I watched Drive
for the first time, when the credits rolled, I got myself a drink and hit play on the DVD again. That's only ever happened to me a handful of times. Of all the films
I've watched over the last few years this is the one I go back to the most.
With every watch it gets better, reveals more and bares a part of its guts
never seen before.
Driver
is a stunt driver, working film sets. Between stunt jobs he works at Shannon’s
garage. Between those jobs he works as a getaway driver. When he moves into a
new apartment he meets his neighbour and her son.
That’s
your set up for the movie, and really, the entire movie hinges on the last line
above – he meets his neighbour and her son. Everything else that happens in the
film comes from that small moment, everything.
Posts
Earlier this month we reviewed Drive, but before that movie and Only God Forgives, Valhalla Rising was Nicolas Winding Rfen's second English language movie after Bronson. It's also the film with the most misleading movie poster/DVD cover in many a year, as the marketing department tries to tap into the hyper-realised, historical ultra-violence market created by 300. This might explain why the film tends to have an adore-it or detest-it response. When you're turning up expecting to see hordes of vikings scrapping it out, and what you find is an hallucinatory, landscape filled journey into Norse myth with beyond minimalist dialogue, you might think you've been short changed. Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt and Casino Royale) plays mute warrior One-Eye in Valhalla Rising [DVD]
